Don’t get me wrong: Some elements of it are amazing. When you do find some down time, you can find yourself in one of the most beautiful places on Earth enjoying its splendor with the leader of the free world and your buddies.

That is—when you can find some down time.

As Washington chews over yet another presidential “vacation,” and that most Washington of words—“optics”—let me take you behind the scenes of the last time President Obama took flack for supposedly being “disengaged” while world events marched on around him.

It was Christmas Day 2009. Osama bin Laden was still at large. A 23-year-old Nigerian man was caught trying to bring down a passenger airliner headed for Detroit—which would have been the most devastating terrorist attack since 9/11. The day of, and the days that followed, the botched bombing saw the president and his staff – in Hawaii, at the White House and scattered across the country on their own family vacations – snap to attention and drop everything else to make sure we were doing all we could to keep Americans safe.

The president was not a passive bystander. He led America’s response to the apparent terrorist attack, soaking up new information as it came in, running meetings and issuing orders. As a regular matter of course, vacation or not, the president is briefed on intelligence every day. In this instance, he was receiving twice-daily updates on the situation in Detroit as well as three-times-daily updates on matters around the world from the Situation Room. As events developed, the president was directing his national security team—cabinet secretaries, intelligence officials and the military. He was awash in reports from the government and from the media.

A small group of us on the staff sat on top of each other for sometimes 20 hours a day in a small secure room inside our hotel. Takeout wrappers and disposable coffee cups would overfill garbage cans until we took them out, since hotel staff were not allowed inside. Without getting into too much of what it takes to turn a normal hotel suite into a SCIF (pronounced “skiff,” short for Secure Compartmented Information Facility), I will say that the only nod to the fact that it was Christmas was an illustration of a Christmas tree printed in a full-page Macy’s ad in the Honolulu newspaper that we had tacked up on the wall. And that was the only thing on any of the walls.

On daily conference calls that began for us at 2 a.m. Hawaii time, the president’s team began assembling information that would be used to brief the president and the press corps. (Unfortunately, the local Starbucks was not keeping the same hours we were, and we were far too decaffeinated for hours of the first calls.)

The president was regularly briefed in person by a member of the traveling national security team, which at the time included Denis McDonough – then the deputy national security advisor, now the White House chief of staff – and Nick Shapiro, currently the deputy chief of staff at the CIA.

I’m not looking for sympathy when I say all this. It was one of the great honors in my life to serve this White House. And I’m not trying to make a woe-is-the-president point – he knew what he was getting into. But it is to illustrate that the president can be, and is, as engaged as is required, even when he is on “vacation.”

Just consider what went into deciding whether or not an address from the president was appropriate in such a circumstance. Regardless of what is being said in the media or by the endless talking heads who have strongly held opinions even without a strong grasp of the facts, key questions must be asked: Do you elevate this failed plot by lending the president’s voice to such a thing? Do you walk into the outcome the terrorists wanted in the first place, which was to visibly disrupt American life with their actions? Do you increase nervousness among Americans while elevating this issue during one of the peak travel times of the year? Can you appreciably advance American interests or assert leadership by speaking out? Is there a need to clearly communicate in a way that only the president can do?

The fact that the president is on vacation is a factor, but it’s not nearly as big a factor as any of those things. Because even though President Obama was on vacation with his family in Honolulu, he was still the president of the United States. And on Martha’s Vineyard the past few weeks, he was still president of the United States. Forget those who say there was too much going on this August: When you have a job that intense, there’s never an ideal time to be off the clock, yet you need to recharge just like everybody else does.

Bill Burton is executive vice president at Global Strategy Group and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.